Connor

MRes/PhD 1+3 student @UofGlasgow. #BCAFC, curry, class, hip-hop, hardcore punk and trains. Aspiring playwright, usually found writing/taking photos. Views own.

[Connor @Connorofbfd]

My letter in yesterday's @yorkshirepost, on the failure of our politicians to support children and families in poverty, with a particular focus on #Bradford.

With analysis from @EndChildPoverty @CPAGUK @ruthpatrick0 @KateAndersen_ @reader_mary @aaronsreeves @kittyjstewart

[Disability News Service @johnpringdns]

Milburn’s ‘participation-first’ NEETs report omits years of evidence linking DWP with deaths
#Milburn #NEETs #DWP #BenefitDeaths
https://t.co/aJYt8we8Dy

[Disability Rights UK @DisRightsUK]

We're launching a nationwide conversation to understand what matters to Disabled people today. We want it to inform our strategy and how we campaign for years to come!

Have your say👇

Survey https://t.co/8sCepjashX
Easy Read https://t.co/Mv0qdPYmWw
BSL https://t.co/eWhtt80Oej

[johndewhirst @jpdewhirst]

Ribblehead Viaduct #YorkshireDales

[johndewhirst @jpdewhirst]

Blue Peter crossing Ribblehead Viaduct #yorkshiredales. @LocoServicesGrp #steamtrain

[Trussell @TrussellUK]

Hunger in the UK isn’t a food problem. It’s an income problem.

Pass it on.

[Disability Rights UK @DisRightsUK]

🚨NEWS 🚨

"One in four of us is Disabled. It’s time the UK government heard us"

Labour needs a new direction. Its first step must be to stop treating Disabled people as a problem to be managed - DR UK Head of Policy, Fazilet Hadi for @openDemocracy 👇https://t.co/8Mff6yQBe3

[David Williamson @theirishego]

Very surprised @theipaper pushing this narrative but let's say it *yet again* for everyone at the back:

PIP is *not* an out-of-work benefit.

It is designed to help pay for the additional costs that come with having a disability.

[GfB 📚 @Dr_Gavin_Brewis]

It's simply not possible for a lot of working-class families now to go along to see their team. We sold our souls and our clubs for "success". In implementing such a measure, Livingston will see their supporter-base massively increase long-term, and they will deserve it!

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

Blair, Burnham, Streeting and Starmer all wrote essays this week. Here’s a summary of what they said for those who can’t be bothered to spend an hour reading about Labour’s favourite pastime: fighting about what it means to be Labour.

Blair's thesis is that Labour lost its nerve after 2007 and needs to rediscover the radical centre. Markets work, the private sector is your friend, competent technocratic government is still the answer, and the biggest transformative force on the horizon is AI, which he sees as a positive revolution that a serious centre-left government should embrace. Miss that wave and you miss everything. TLDR; the model isn't broken. Labour just needs to run it properly and stop indulging the perennial delusion that losing votes to the right means the country secretly wants you to go left.

Burnham, Streeting and Starmer think this misses the point. And they broadly agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the cure.

All three locate the origin of Britain's political unravelling in 2008, not 2007. The financial crisis broke the implicit bargain of modern capitalism: work hard, things get better. When that bargain collapsed and the banks got bailed out while wages stagnated for a decade, people got poorer – but also angry in a deeper, harder-to-satisfy way. And then austerity poured petrol on everything.

The more philosophically interesting disagreement is about what the crisis was actually a crisis of. Blair frames it as a delivery failure: the wrong policies and the wrong positioning. Starmer and Burnham both reach for ‘dignity’. The idea that whole communities (post-industrial, working class, people who didn't go to university) were made to feel invisible. That implies a fundamentally different kind of politics.

Burnham argues that New Labour never actually took Britain off the Thatcherite track. He blames deregulation, privatisation, leaving things to the market for the cost of living crisis. The centre failed people. You can't win them back by reasserting it more confidently. On AI, Burnham calls for tougher regulation of big tech and signals that an active, interventionist state would govern how AI develops rather than leaving it to the market. For Burnham, ungoverned AI is just the latest mechanism by which powerful interests extract value from everyone else.

Streeting is more moderate but lands in similar territory. Inequality is the organising fact of contemporary politics, and treating it as secondary is what produced the crisis in the first place. When the rules stop rewarding effort fairly, resentment grows.

Starmer agrees Britain should be an AI superpower, but where Blair frames AI as an opportunity to be seized, Starmer frames it as a force to be governed. The question isn't just whether AI grows the economy but whether Britain is a rule-maker or a rule-taker, and whether the gains flow to Blyth and Castleford or just to London.

The deepest difference, underneath all of this, is a question about whether the post-war and post-Thatcher economic settlement is fixable or finished. Blair thinks it needs better management and AI is the tool that makes better management possible. The others think the settlement itself was the problem, and are open to the possibility that AI (if ungoverned) compounds it by concentrating power further.

[George Monaghan @GMonaghan1998]

One million NEETs are a statistic, but every NEET is a tragedy.

This is what it's all about folks. Beautiful and courageous from @lifeisnotanovel. Truer than any survey.

[Dr Jay Watts @Shrink_at_Large]

A politician or journalist would not be asked to define who is “disabled enough” when it comes to cancer, heart disease or diabetes.

Why does the media think it is acceptable to platform politicians and journalists as arbiters of psychiatric disability?

[johndewhirst @jpdewhirst]

Shipley Glen benches. #Bradford

[johndewhirst @jpdewhirst]

Salt's Mill, Saltaire #Bradford.

[BENEFITS NEWS @BENEFITS_NEWS]

You can be anti-welfare ... until the day your world comes crashing down and you need it... to find much of it decimated, if you vote for types that spout about sick, disabled or those fallen on hard times.
Wisdom is where you think "that could be me". It happens!

[Despotic Inroad @DespoticInroad]

Some people on the Left, for many years: The last half century of economic liberalisation, privatisation, outsourcing etc. has left Britain over-financialised, regionally imbalanced, exposed to global shocks, with reduced state capacity & with a labour market defined by precarity + low productivity. We should reverse this by strengthening collective bargaining, and via big public investment in infrastructure, critical industries, and by reversing the denationalisation of national assets/natural monopolies that are currently structured to benefit rentier capital.

Sensibles: LITERALLY NOBODY HAS A DIAGNOSIS OF OUR PROBLEMS. LITERALLY NOBODY IS OFFERING ANY ANALYSIS. LITERALLY NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHY NOTHING WORKS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. BUT WOW TONY BLAIR SAID AI IS BIG AND LOW GROWTH IS A PROBLEM AND WE SHOULD GO BACK TO THE 1990S, EXCEPT WITH MORE ORACLE SOFTWARE PLZ.

[johndewhirst @jpdewhirst]

New book on the history of Bradford City released in September, 2026. Join the mailing list for updates: https://t.co/2a0i65aqwg

[johndewhirst @jpdewhirst]

Settle Carlisle Railway Development Company S&C 150th Anniversary charter train on the return to Carlisle yesterday evening at Ribblehead #yorkshiredales. @SettleCarlisle @foscl @yorkshire_dales